Sermon: “Humble, Like a Child” Matthew 18:1-14 , March 8, 2026

Scripture: Matthew 18:1-14

Preacher: Ryan Slifka

Sermon: “Humble, Like a Child”

“At that time the disciples came to Jesus,” says today’s scripture. “At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

Now, they clearly aren’t asking Jesus who’s gonna be the top Christian in the afterlife. It’s not who will be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, but who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? Who’s number one in the Jesus movement? They ask him. How can we distinguish ourselves as we live under your direction, under the rule of God on earth?

It’s a reasonable question to ask of anybody, let alone Jesus. What makes us great? We’re given a lot of answers to that question. Money, success. Strength, power. Physical fitness, beauty or sexual prowess. Fame, or renown. The depth of our passion for justice or our absolute commitment to political causes. They’re all answers to the variation on the question: what does it mean to live an authentic life, one that matters not only to ourselves, but to God, or the universe? What does it mean to be worthwhile. In the grand scheme of things?

We’re given a lot of answers. And here’s the answer Jesus gives the disciples:

“He called a child,” it says. He called a child whom he put among them,  and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children. Unless you change and become like children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child. That person is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus answers the question with a live, squirming youth. Talk about a sermon prop!

“Who’s the greatest?” they ask. Jesus drops a kid in their midst. Whoever’s like this one, he says. This is the one who’s greatest in the kingdom of heaven. In fact, unless you become like this child, you’re not even getting in. It’s the minimum requirement.

What does it mean to be great? If we wanna be great, according to Jesus, we’ve gotta become like children.

Now, what’s that mean? Somehow, I don’t think Jesus means becoming childish. I mean, if that were so it’d be good news for me. I’d be king of this place for sure.

Now, we don’t really get the scandalous edge here in Jesus’ words. I mean, we love kids. But no one in Jesus’ time would have said anything like “the children are our future.” Because for Jesus’ hearers, children are basically at the very bottom of life’s hierarchy. No rights, no status at all. Worse than women, even! If you can imagine. To become a child is to become the opposite of great.

Think about what children are like. Children are not only weak, not only defenseless.  When you’re a kid you can’t be independent or self-sufficient because everybody else is stronger than you. You’re trusting, you’re completely dependent on other people, especially your parents, for survival. Like, you can’t claim status and greatness, because you don’t actually have any of it! You aren’t in charge of your own destiny, but your destiny is shaped completely by others. Children in Jesus’ times are nothings! They’re nobodies!

So to become a child is to become a nothing. To enter into the kingdom of heaven, to be part of what God is doing in the world. To be great, we have to give up on all pretense of greatness. At least greatness as the world defines it. We have to refuse all the tempting definitions of greatness that our culture—indeed every culture offers—whether it’s material success, or status, strength, the esteem of our colleagues and compatriots. We have to trade in the delusion that our lives are the product of our own making, for simple child-like trust in the God who made us.

This is what being a child is like. This is what it means to be great. And this is what Jesus means here by us becoming humble like children. To be somebodies, we’ve gotta become nobodies. It’s the only way into Jesus’ kingdom in this life, or the next. For our lives to account for something, we’ve gotta become nothing.

Now, at this point you might be thinking to yourself: there it is. Always with these Christians and hating themselves. It’s just like earlier in the church service when we did that confession, talked about all the bad stuff we’ve done. Wanna be great? Gotta grovel to God, think of ourselves like garbage. Then God, that total masochist will finally like us.

Maybe you’ve heard that. But that’s not the case at all. Because you see, God LOVES nothings and nobodies.

“Whoever welcomes one such child,” he says, whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

This works a couple of ways.

First of all, Jesus says that if the church community welcomes a child—a weak nothing—they welcome him. Not only is this a reason why we pour time and energy into children’s ministry—which it is. We don’t wanna turn away Jesus! It also means that Jesus identifies with the nothings of the world!

That’s what Christmas is about, the incarnation. When God came into the world, God didn’t show up in a board room, suit-ready. God didn’t arrive at the helm of a tank. God didn’t even show up on a street corner with a protest sign in his hand. God was born in a barn, laid in a feeding trough. God became a weak and defenseless child. Not only that, but God died a criminal’s death on a cross. That’s just about as nothing as you can get. It says that God loves nothings!

This is what Jesus means when he goes on and on with all that unpleasant stuff about the little ones. You’d rather drown with a giant rock around your neck than see what happens if you mess with the little ones, he says. It’d be better to chop off multiple limbs or gouge out your eye than end up in the hell reserved for those who get in the between God and the little ones. Who are these little ones?

We don’t know for sure. The guesses range from poor believers, the spiritually weak or immature, or missionaries who are vulnerable to their hosts. Or even what John Calvin calls the “feeble minded.” Regardless of who the little ones are exactly, what they have in common is that they are weak, defenseless, without what we’d call these days social capital. Basically the little ones are all those other folks who, like children are nothings.

“Don’t despise the little ones,” Jesus says. They got angels watching over them who have God’s ear. Like these people are so precious to God, there’s hell to pay if anyone ever messes with them. Like I love them so much, Jesus says, that I came like the shepherd who would leave the flock of ninety-nine to rescue the single lost sheep. I came that that none of the little ones would perish, none of them would be lost. I’d even go so far as to die on a cross for all their transgressions.

On one hand it’s a warning against all our self-justifications. Like, if we treat any person as lesser than us in God’s sight—there’s hell to pay. There is no better than in the kingdom of heaven.

But it’s the greatest reminder that God LOVES nothings. In fact, Jesus says that God loves the nothings as nothings. God loves the nothings based on nothing that they have done. Nothing they could ever do.

Does that mean that we’ve gotta hate ourselves in order for God to love us? No! While it does mean that everything we put in the center of our lives, everything we lift up as great, wealth, status, achievement, they all count for nothing in the end. God loves us as we are, based on nothing that we are, but on who God is. What does a child have to do to be a child? Nothing! Just be what it is. It means we can cease striving and flailing our lives away.

There’s nothing we can do in order to be great. Because greatness is found in our nothingness. But the good news is that God LOVES nothings and nobodies. Meaning that everyone loved by God is a somebody indeed.

If you’re a fan of Mockingbird ministries you might have already read or heard about the recent piece by the American pastor Kyle Wells. The piece is titled “What Remains When Nothing Can Be Done: Lent and the Grace of Uselessness.”[i]

In it he tells the story of some of their couple friends. Before they met, the wife had rented a home in their house at one point, becoming part of their family. He eventually married her and her husband, with Wells’ daughter serving as flower girl at their wedding. He baptized their first two children, and now they were expecting a third.

However, the couple had just discovered that their unborn child has anencephaly, a relatively rare condition where the baby develops without most of the brain and skull. Miscarriages can be devastating enough. But this one was particularly difficult for both of them. Though the child is alive in the womb, there’s no cure. No way forward. Just time to carry, and then deliver a baby who will not live.

“I watched his father struggle,” Well says, “I watched him struggle to say what could not quite be said. Beneath the grief and confusion was a question that would haunt any parent in his position: Does my son’s life matter? Does a life that cannot be fixed, extended, or made productive still mean something?”

A baby like this, a child like this. That’s just about as nothing as you can get. Isn’t it? But the hardest question for them was “does this life matter?”

In the end, they decided that it did, indeed.

“They named their son Alexander,” Wells writes. “Alexander meaning protector of mankind.” One of the strongest, greatest names out there.

“It is a startling name,” he continues. “At first, it almost sounded cruel. This child would not protect anyone in the ways we usually mean. And yet, over time, I began to see how fitting the name was.

This child is protecting us — not from suffering but from the assumption that meaning must be earned, that a life must justify itself, that worth is secured by capacity, outcome, or endurance.

Alexander’s life stands in the way of that assumption. Simply by being carried, by being loved. Simply by refusing to make sense on our terms.

For me, his life has become a witness against a temptation I cannot seem to shake: to believe value is achieved rather than received, proven rather than given. His very existence exposes how quickly I want a life to justify itself.

The season of Lent leads the church back to the cross, where we cannot pretend our lives are secured by strength or usefulness. The path Lent traces is not a training regimen for spiritual growth. It is a slow undoing. We walk with Jesus toward the cross not to learn endurance but to be relieved of the burden of proving that our lives — and the lives of those we love — are worth something. The cross is not where suffering is explained. It is where the demand for explanation finally collapses.

And what remains? The God whose love justifies a life without regard to any worth.

Christ does not redeem human life by making it impressive. He redeems it by joining it at its most exposed. And in doing so, he answers a question we cannot answer for ourselves: A life matters not because of what it can do, become, or survive — but because it is held, named, and loved by God.”

Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? How can we live lives that matter? Unless you become like this child, Jesus says, you won’t even get a pinky toe into the kingdom of heaven. You will never be something, unless you become the nothing that you are.

But the good news is that God LOVES nothings. And God’s love for nothings and nobodies, makes us somebodies.

Our greatness is all on account of the God who loves us, so much so that he would become a weak, defenseless child to die on a cross for our sake, to give us the gift of life in this world and the next. In the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we have been made children of the living God, co-heirs of the kingdom of heaven, born again by water and the Spirit. To be great is to give up all worldly notions of greatness, including the very notion that there’s anything that we can do to justify our existence. There’s nothing we can do to earn true greatness in this world. Because true greatness is a given. A gift from the living God.

May you, dear friends, take hold of your greatness as children of God. And may you welcome others as fellow children in his name, knowing that in doing so, you welcome the Lord himself.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the

[i] Kyle Wells, “What Remains When Nothing Can Be Done: Lent and the Grace of Uselessness,” Mockingbird Ministries https://mbird.com/suffering/what-remains-when-nothing-can-be-done/